Human Futures and Histories | ADN Conference 2019

CT: Hi everyone. Thank you so much for joining us this afternoon for Human Futures and Histories which will hopefully enliven your afternoon. My name is Corrie. I'm the moderator for today's panel and we have three wonderful practitioners and makers and artists here with us today from both Singapore and Malaysia. So how this will work is each of them will talk a little bit about certain parts of their practices that intersects with this broader topic, maybe going into certain directions or taking certain paths and then we'll do a round of discussion on a kind of broader context of our history and our kind of engagements with this. And then we're going to maybe more specific, deeper excavations about each of their practices in relation to the theme that we are all working around. But first of all, I thought I would introduce these three wonderful people next to me. Right at the end of the table we Zihan from Singapore. He's an artist and an academic working at the intersections of critical theory and performance. And you might have seen some of his performance work at the Fringe Festival or SIFA or at the Esplanade. He's actually going to be starting with his PhD, (so congratulations) later this year. Join the club! With research focus on descendent gestures of performative dissidents over time in Singapore. If you want to find out more about his work you can go to loozihan.com. 

And next to him, we have Jo Kukathas from Malaysia. You may have very well seen her in various performances in Singapore over the many, many years. She's an actor, writer and director of the Instant Cafe Theatre Company, where she has created some of her most iconic characters. And she's done numerous one-person shows, sometimes written for her. You may have seen her in for example also Huzir Sulaiman’s Occupation or Wild Rice’s Hotel, various other pieces that have been staged across the years or Atomic Jaya. 

Next to me I have Jean Tay from Singapore, who is a really prolific playwright who has written more than 20 plays and musicals which have been performed in Singapore, the US, the UK and Italy. You may know her from works such as Senang, Sisters, Boom and Everything but the Brain, which is currently a literature text that are taught in secondary schools. And for Everything but the Brain, she also won Best Original Script at the LIFE! Theater Awards. Recently, she's been exploring a lot of site-specific and participatory work including the performance tour Chinatown Crossings or recently Flowers, that takes place in a home and the trilogy It Won’t Be Too Long, particularly The Cemetery (Dusk) where they looked at Bukit Brown cemetery.

So the topic that we're looking at kind of, it's quite a sprawling topic. to think of this notion of what history is and I think as each of the artists talks more about the work, we'll have more of a sense about what their connection with this project is. I think each other people here has been working a really diverse ways with notions of personal history, private history, political history, public history, performative history and I think they will explore a bit more about why this matters to them in their approach to art and into performance. How they sort of you know navigate some of the ethical, political and personal questions that emerge in the process. I think in Singapore particularly, this feels like a very heavily Singaporean panel in the mix of quite an international lineup that we've had. I think particular to us we've had a perpetual fixation about how we navigate histories that have been given to us, how we reclaim them, how we look at erasure, how we look at what we can imagine for a future history and what it means when histories are decided upon with particular motivations that result in erasure and bias and how do we think these narratives to frame maybe more critical and broader insights about the human condition. I won't speak too much. I think during this first section, each of them will explore in their own way the larger notions of why engaging with histories is important in your practice, what history is they are engaged in, what their concerns are, how they used in the arts, what they choose to focus on, which ones they avoid and yeah various other parts of their personal practices. So, we'll start with Jo. 

JK: Hello everybody. Yes, that's me. Actor, writer, director, dramaturg. History of the human condition.It's a really massive topic and in looking at the idea of the human condition in my work, I began to ask myself what I was and what we are and for myself I wanted to ask, as artists are we public and political or are we private and individual? 

So I began to think about the history of my own country and my own personal history as well. So my country is 56 years old. It was formed in 1963. My theatre company is 30 years old. I mean when I realize that I realized some of my characters that I play, which I created 30 years ago, you know more than half the age of, my country's only twice as old as some of my characters. So our histories are very interlinked and I think that's why my work is political and I'm desperately trying to become more private but it's impossible. But on a personal level, I am also 56 years old. Although I was born actually the year before my country was formed but I'm not yet 57, so calling myself 56. And I'm very interested in these accidents of history right, and yesterday we're talking about different kinds of dramaturgy. So, I began to wonder last night about the dramaturgy of birth. We talked that climates has a place in dramaturgy, so then if climate has a place in dramaturgy then why not the dramaturgy of birth as well. My father was a writer, a journalist, a government critic. He used to work for the government for radio TV Malaya, later for the government as a diplomat but very quickly became a critic and a thorn in the side for many people in the government. And the first thing first job I had after university was to come and help him edit his book which was fiercely anti-government book. So my early education was completely political and even though I studied politics and philosophy, I never thought I was going to enter into the world of theatre, I always thought my work would be in journalism or as a writer and certainly my instincts are very activist, much more than they are theatre. Theatre was another accident of history. My mother was a teacher, a reader and I think that's very important for me and a gardener. And both my parents their parents came from Sri Lanka. So that's my personal history. I bring up the gardener because my mother was always planting things in the garden but that was because that's what her family did as well. When my grandfather cleared the land in Ipoh, he built a house and planted lots of trees, and every time one of his 20 children got married, he planted another tree. So the idea of taking root in a country was very important. But I spent a lot of my early years away from my country and I came back at the age of 21 to find a country that was all about race, and it was a big shock to me, to be told I wasn't quite the same as everybody else and it took a long time to, no, I've never negotiated that fact. And so a lot of my work reflects that. It reflects the sense of not belonging and saying, no, I do belong. 

So my public history, my private history would therefore collided from a very early age. That the family was deeply political. I grew up thinking in political terms. I grew up thinking also about my extended family and their lives as well. But what did I do? I formed a theatre company 30 years ago to do political satire and the history of my company and the history of my country I feel are very interlinked. Things happen because something happened in the country. So in 1987, there was an something called Operation Lalang which for me was very formative because 130 people were arrested and detained without trial. Major newspapers were shut down. My house, somebody who lived in the house with me was also arrested and detained without trial for two years. My father was on the books but they did not detain him. He was really quite aggravated by that I think, always, but I think they thought it wasn't a good idea and he never really lived it down, I think. 

So I formed a theatre company and we did political satire because we felt the only way that we could express what we wanted to express was through the venue of comedy and through satire and trying to look at our country that way. So from the start they were both linked but a lot of people said this is not Malaysian culture. Satires not part of our culture and I beg to differ. I think wayang kulit is a subversive art form. With wayang kulit you always have as you can see there the Pak Dogols of the world. He is the one who is caught between the tempest of power and I feel for myself, as well and for my company, as satirist, that's who we are and we represent that character in the wayang kulit.  And so when people say it's not your culture, it's not our culture to be satirical, I feel they're just plain wrong. So I've always been interested in these characters in the margins the ones without power, the powerless. So I've always been interested in them and I think most of the work that I've done over the years has been about such stories and such people. So as a political satirist, that's my public self and that's where I tell public stories which are linked to larger issues of the nation and national narratives. 

So this is a show I did four years ago called D’State of D’Nation. Those of you who are Malaysian or Singaporeans who may know what's been happening in Malaysia, may know that there was 2.6 billion donation that was given to our then Prime Minister. This was in 2016 that we did this show and of course, the state of the nation was the topic on everyone's lips. But I think the work has always been to ask what is the state of the nation and then the question, then is whose story is it? And I had often been made to feel that I've had no right to tell the stories of my nation or had to tell it in a very marginal form. So I felt no, the only way then is to actually claim your right to have a place to tell the stories. So I whose story is it, whose history is it and I thought if I cannot tell the stories as myself because I felt I could not, then I began to invent characters. 

So this the first character I invented 30 years ago called Ribena Berry. And Ribena berry is a Chinese, as you can see, and because I was really annoyed by this notion of race, because everything was always about race and class. So I created a Chinese beauty queen from up north and she spoke in her own kind of English language, that's how she speaks and through her very naive voice, she spoke a lot of truth about politics. Because she completely believed everything she heard but she would say it the way she heard it and through her character I began, I was able to say very critical things about the government would say but she's praising you, she's not saying anything bad about you, she's praising the government through her naivete. So she was a very useful character for me to be able to say things that otherwise they wouldn't be allowed to say and it was a time when you were told basically you can't say things you'll get into a lot of trouble. When my company was first started everybody said he would last a week and I'm very happy to know that it's still around thirty years later. 

The second character I created was this guy. His name is YB. While YB is, he is a Member of Parliament. He is a Deputy Minister. He's been a Deputy Minister now for 30 years but recently he lost in the last election. So I talk about these characters. These characters, they were created 30 years ago but they performed for 30 years at various times,  on stage sometimes ,in public spaces sometimes, they have open book, they have launched books they have opened galleries, they have launched art exhibitions, they have spoken at law dinners, they have their own life. YB even has his Twitter account where he was often roundly abused for some of his views. And now in the last election, he lost his seat but he's still, no, sorry. He won his seat but he is no longer in Parliament. He's now a member of the opposition. So he went through a real identity crisis because he no longer is in power but he still has his seat of Ulu Katak which Malaysians or Malay speaking Singaporeans will know is a, it's a joke. 

Then these two characters turned up a bit later. This is Puan Badariah Tudung Periuk. She’s a government civil service. She has changed over the years as well, she's also developed. When I first created her, I was upset about things within the government bureaucracy but later I became to understand who she was and again she's taken on her own life. When I was invited to do a TED talk, I chickened out and Puan Badariah  did it for me instead and spoke at this TED talk about interconnectivity. This is Judge Mental Singh. He appeared because of the of the trial of our then Deputy Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim. So I needed a I needed a judge to condemn people you know in in court and his opening line for every trial was, “You sign accused of sodomy”. It didn't matter what you were on trial for but you were going to be trialed for sodomy whether you liked it or not. So I needed him to talk about the leak, what is happening to our justice system. And then I got very tired of all these characters and I found this character. And she was the one who's in some ways the closest to me. My other characters - a Chinese beauty queen, no, a Muslim politician, no, Malay civil servant, no, Indian judge, oh well Indian, but that's it, but Curry Spice was, well not that I look like her either, she was in some ways, said the things I felt I couldn't say. She was the only first character who spoke directly about what she felt and she basically said -  I'm a minority. I don't matter in this country but fuck off.  Sorry she's very French. She said basically to audience fuck off, piss off. I don't care what you might think because I'm Indian and I matter in the rest of the world because black lives matter. So as far as she's concerned she didn't care about the race politics of the country. 

But I was also interested in other people's stories, voices from the margins as I said. So I was a dramaturg for a program called First Works where we created new stories which tackled issues in Malaysia – bullying, homophobia, interracial conflict, plays that came out of the reformist movement, so adaptations for example of Accidental Death of an Anarchist. Even when I did much <…> it was really about race relations in Malaysia, about justice. And when I looked at and I started doing intercultural work. This was my first project. I did in Japan called Pulau Antara or the island in between. I was looking at history and memory. So this is a conventional idea of history and talk about today. But I was very interested in the idea of ghosts and memory in this play. 

We were talking yesterday about human and post-human, that ghosts are not just human, they are also post-human ghosts. And I realized I was very interested in the histories of people but more interested in histories of the dead because the dead really can't speak and I've always been interested in those who can't speak but the dead in particular. And so I began to write a few plays which involve dead people walking. Like this man who was a politician, who's now dead comes back to haunt his family full of regrets. This transvestite sex worker who is dead because she's murdered by a school boy but she comes back to find justice as well. 

And then I made a big departure and went into a series called Almost True Stories because I'd always shied away from telling any personal stories. My work was always political. The stories were always political and then after my mother passed away, I started finding myself wanting to write her story or our story and I couldn't bring myself to do it because I'm quite private and I don't like to put them out there. And I was trying to write a play about something else and my mother kept intruding and till finally I had no choice but to write a story about her. And this then began my incursion into writing my more private stories and I call them Almost True Stories because, of course, they are not quite true but this began the kind of more personal stories. I'm a Sri Lankan migrant family and in the first play I did called Silence, Please, it was a personal story but I couldn't help but bringing the political into it because at the same time that this was happening there was a lot of incidences in Malaysia of body snatching. Meaning that people who had discovered at their death to have been Muslim because they converted at some point, were taken away from the home at the day on the day of the burial. It was very traumatic so I began to imagine what it might be like for me if on the day of my mother's death, I suddenly discovered she had she'd converted to Islam for some reason and on some certificate she was seen as Muslim. So I had nightmares about her being taken away before the chance to bury her body and this piece came out of that. So again, the political kept coming into the personal. And other migrants also appeared into the play to tell their stories as well like the neighbors of this family in the in this play. And then I just went into very personal stories and this play was based on a very personal story in my family and I turned it into a play again, about migration, migrants, people who don't belong who travel the globe now looking for something. So in this case Raj and his uncle traveled to New York to try to find hope. It coincides with a terrible tragedy along the way but I realized that I was coming closer to the idea of the ‘I’ in my stories quite literally sometimes. 

Now let's go back a bit to the history of the fictional characters. So these are five of the characters I've played. I connect these five because these are the ones whom I've played many times over the years. The other characters I've played kind of one-off but these characters keep coming back and they really have their own life. People find it strange I was talking about them in the third person but I do feel that they are quite outside myself and they turn up because they are needed for something and I used them and they come to me and say, I'll do it, for example with the TED talk or in the past at a law conference I had to go and speak and I felt I couldn't do it. So YB he went and spoke instead at the law conference. It was much more interesting. I think he's a much more confident person that I am. Judge Mental Singh went to open an exhibition once, of work where judges wigs were made out of cow dung by a Malaysian artist. And most recently I did a show called The May 9 Show which featured these two characters and The May 9 Show is a reflection of last year's watershed elections, the May 9th elections last year when after 60 years we had a change of government in the country. And a lot of my work has been done in the past has been very oppositional and it's very strange to me you suddenly find myself on the winning side and it was very hard for YB to study discover he's on the losing side and hard for me to try to get him to speak but he did eventually. And in this play or in the show rather also YB, he's now not in power anymore he however has plans to run in the next general election for prime minister and he plans to win. And Curry Spice my character from Sentul who's a bisexual Indian woman from Sentul. Sentul is a very working-class area large or used to be a very working-class area she's also announced her candidacy to run for the next general election. So, she's gonna start her campaign trail and I'm gonna see what, how that pans out in the next in the run-up to the next general election I might well do it. And also in this show what I tried to do was to break down the barriers between what is real, what was not real. Every night we had important, we have guests to join us on the show. The show is in the format of a talk show so YB was being interviewed about his plans for the future. Curry Spice was interviewed about her manifesto for a better Malaysia by becoming the next prime minister of the country, and we invited various activists and politicians so for example Ambiga Sreenevasan used to the chairperson of Berseh, human rights activists. Noor Farida is a woman who is with G25 was very critical of the government. People like these two, below, are now ministers in the new government, activists, trans activists, women's rights activists and the last picture is Clare Rewcastle Brown who broke the big story about the 1MDB crisis in Malaysia and the editor of Malaysiakini, who has been instrumental again in creating change in Malaysia. So I want to have a conversation with these changemakers, but this time YB was having a conversation from the point of somebody who had lost and it was very hard for him actually. I mean two people in the in the last slide kept on saying to him, we're not going to talk to you because you should be in jail and it was very difficult for him to hear that. He wasn't used to people not being respectful. And this is Curry Spice and she has a Womanifesto for GE15 and this platform was a platform for her to say to the audience what her manifesto was and to get people to join her, to help her campaign under the banner of Inikarilah, which if you’re Malaysian, you will also have some inkling of what that might mean. So that was The May 9 Show. 

But with all my characters I think many years ago I was part of a Asian collaboration of six nations trying to do a collaborative play called Hotel Grand Asia and the dramaturg was, one of the dramaturgs rather, was a historian called Sumit Mandal and when we were try to write this piece he said to us, or create this piece, he said to us, these are historical narratives of the nation but actually they're all fictions anyway, right, the nation is a fiction. So all you need to do is create your own fiction and I think that's what I've been trying to do since. Just to create my own fiction, my own reality because if you don't give me a place within the nation, I will just take one anyway and say this is as real as anything that you are proposing to me which is what I've tried to do. And Curry Spices’ Bumanifesto basically ends with the idea of the nation is anything you want it to be, you just have to imagine it. And I think in finishing off perhaps looking at this idea here of histories that your history is, I mean, my history is for me what I have to make of it that I think in a country like Malaysia which is a very new country where people were trying to build it from the very beginning and I see in my parents their attempt to build the country, then I think we are also part of that idea of building it and as an artist I feel I build it through this fiction which hopefully will and can become real. 

CT: Thank you very much, Jo. I think Jo’s work has really given a sense of how the fictional can lay a very strong claim over a very long period of time not just a kind of one-off event but these characters cultivate, these emissaries I guess of your personal and political life over a span of 30 years have creating their own very intricate sense of personal identity that form a history that is very much accurate portrayal of everything that's happened within those those few decades. We're moving on to Zihan who will look at a real person's life and the histories that spiral out from this fulcrum of a person in With/out.  

LZ: Actually, that's a great segue because we're talking about like fictional imagination, versioning of histories. I have a short preamble. Then, I'm going to talk briefly about two productions I did, if I have time. If not I'll just stick to With/Out. So I'm gonna read from my preamble first and then I'm gonna show a few photos of With/out for those people who haven't seen or heard about the work before, and then I'm gonna make some remarks on the production itself. 

So just expanding and staying on topic this is my response to the questions that were sent out earlier as part of this panel. Very much like Jo, I think especially in Singapore from a Singaporean perspective, our histories have always been instrumentalized by the state and used to further like a singular determined narrative in Singapore. There's no alternative perspective that is tolerated and even more so current with political developments around POFMA and protection of online falsehoods, is this consolidation of power to a singular figure or singular figures, in a way, in the within the cabinet. And I see the role of artists or theatre maker or somebody who is producing work in Singapore as providing alternatives and to most importantly inculcate a sense of criticality in the viewer or the reader or the audience. In my perspective there are different strategies of achieving this criticality and I've adopted some strategies of allowing the audience or the reader or the viewer to pay attention to the minute or the everyday or the mundane in one of my work or some of my works. At the same time also providing them with a sort of paradigm shift in thinking through and visioning collectively, counterfactual history or counterfactual kind of imagined future and I'm not the only one who is doing this. Another person that comes to mind would be Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye and also The Necessary Stage’s productions like Manifesto. This collective utilizing of art in a way to imagine what is not permitted to be imagined or seen or heard. Most importantly for myself also linked to my practice as an educator, it comes in a form of investigating how information is transmitted and how it is consumed in theatre and it's linked to Martin’s observation about the theatre space itself as an infrastructure that you know stultifies, to use a Ranciér-ian term, the audience into a kind of way of absorbing information. So in a way both productions that I'm talking about today resists and refuse and try to jolt the reader or the viewer or the audience out of a way of consuming theater, in a way some people will call it participation which is this well as we floating around today, saw negative connotations but in a way is a strategy of allowing them to think beyond the ways of consuming information that they have been so indoctrinated with since the years in an education system. 

Okay and also somewhat linked to my thesis that I'm going to do and hopefully I survive doing. The grounding question for my research is how do we calibrate our relationship to performance and theater and move it beyond an obsession or fetishization of the here and the now and the event. 

Do I have to repeat that again? How do we recalibrate our relationship to performance and theater beyond the here and now and the event?

So beyond that two hours or two hours and 15 minutes, how do we move beyond that to talk about things and to imagine performance beyond that frame. How can we extend it, extrapolate on that? So a performance that last like ten years or gesture that is completed within two weeks. So this in a way I'm thinking about examining gesture extended over a longer trajectories of time and turning our attention to the gesture of archiving and collecting information as a quiet revolutionary gesture, which is especially necessary under illiberal regimes, where we are not permitted to protest or assemble like more than one person in Hong Lim Park with a permit and a license you know. If we are not allowed to perform conventional modes of protests and revolution, how can protests and revolutions still happen, all the time, extended in different ways, in different forms. 

So the two productions I will be talking about today have been an experiment personally in reconfiguring or disrupting a relationship and with the viewer and a disorientation of sorts, in order for the viewer to re-orientate themselves and to reanimate their relationship to the fetish of the life and once again inculcate and encourage a sense of criticality. 

Okay the preamble is a bit long. So I'm going to jump into the work. The first one I'm going to talk about is With/Out. How many of you have seen it? Just a show of hands. How many of you have heard of it? Just a show hands. Okay. So I'm gonna do a little bit more context to explain. 

So With/Out is actually based on Completely Without Character which is a production that was staged by The Necessary Stage in 1999 featuring monologue performed and written in collaboration with Haresh Sharma and Alvin Tan by Paddy Chew, who is the first person in Singapore to come out publicly as living with HIV. This was in 1998-1999. The performance was in 1999. He passed away in August of 1999, shortly after the performance. So in a way my gesture that an intent was to archive the piece, first and foremost. So I went into TNS’ archives and I dugged through the material and I found some video documentation that survived and I decided to use the material, reconfigure it. I presented a first draft version for in 2015 as part of the Singapore Fringe Festival at Centre 42 and after that I continued to develop it on the invitation of Esplanade into a piece that I roped in performer Janice Koh to re-performed Paddy’s words and using technological headphones infrastructure and other headphone play in a way, we to revisit this documentation. So I'm just going to show a short clip from, that contains several production stills, and also Janice introducing the production and it’ll give some context. Remember you walk into the theater space, at Esplanade Theatre Studio. It's a piece where it's like a promenade piece where you can walk around and sit wherever you want to. You are given a pair of headphones with three different channels on it and Janice will talk about it later and this introduction is playing on the headphones and I'm gonna show like some production stills so that you can see how the production look like.  

[Video]

You are watching the first of 12 scenes from Completely Without Character. This monologue was performed by Paddy Chew and devised in collaboration with Alvin Tan and Haresh Sharma from The Necessary Stage. For those of us in the theater space, you have been given a wireless headset and there are three audio channels that you can choose from. This channel you are listening to, is the first audio channel and it will feature my live performance of the script. The second channel is documentation of Paddy's performance in 1999. The third channel is a mix of both first and second channels. We are also streaming tonight's performance ‘live’ on our Facebook page. There will be a question and answer session in the middle of the performance and we invite questions from both the theater audience and those joining us online. For those in the theater space, you are welcome to move around and to experience the performance from various vantage points. If you are listening to this, please consider shifting to a different position now. 

Haresh and Alvin were looking to interview HIV-positive individuals in preparation for production in June 1998 and they were introduced to Paddy. During the interview process, Paddy spoke with so much vigour and passion that Haresh and Alvin decided to continue talking to him. They spoke about the possibility of creating a play about Paddy’s life. In August 1998, Alvin and Haresh spent a few months interviewing Paddy. They would meet once or twice a week, either at Paddy’s or Alvin’s place. Sometimes, they would spend the whole afternoon just watching television together over food and drinks. At the end of the interview process, they took a break and Haresh started structuring the interview content into a monologue. Paddy decided to come out publicly with his HIV status at the first Singapore AIDS conference in December 1998. The version that you will hear me perform tonight is the version that Haresh wrote. Paddy, Haresh and Alvin began rehearsals on this script. Over the rehearsal process, Paddy would continue to embellish and improvise the way he told his life story. So the eventual version he performed in May 1999 is captured in the video documentation that you are watching. This documentation was edited by Zihan from different recordings of the performance. Like how Haresh structured Paddy's words, Zihan tried to assemble the most potent version of Paddy's performance in this documentation. Tonight, we invite you to experience these versions of Completely Without Character and to consider the gap that lies between them.

Okay so that's kind of like a preamble. If you don't really get it, I'll break it down for you again. There are different multiple versions of the same script that survives. So every night in the documentation of the three or four nights that Paddy performs it, it's a different way of presenting. He breaks down at different points in a play based on his own life experience. He sometimes like rambles or go off tangent and comes back to the script and for the longest time when I wanted to do research and archival into the production, I would be given Haresh’s version and I didn't know that there was a different version that actually existed until I went through the documentation. So as an archivist or as a theatre maker, the most fascinating bits for me was the gap between Haresh’s version, which they started we are so with which is this very tight version that Janice performed that night ‘live’ and it's dramatized. Versus the documentation version and the discrepancy can be sometimes -  so that evening at Esplanade, the documentation will be playing on screen, scene by scene, 12 scenes and Janice will perform it in cadence and sometimes Janice would finish 2-3 minutes before Paddy’s documentation finish because basically that's Haresh’s script. The script has run out. So for the for the last 2 or 3 minutes she'll be watching the television or she'll be watching alongside the audience. And also the added factor of the headphones because Martin would ask - how does it add to the world of the play in the technological elements. So it allows for Janice to take on a really different way of emoting and expressing the language that Haresh wrote and it allowed for really, really intimate moments of confession - which is what Paddy’s production is about, like a confession and leaving behind a statement, a confession of sorts. So it allows for the confessional performance and in a very intimate way of revealing information to the listener and the viewer. 

Yeah, what's the time now? Maybe I'll pause now and give way to Jean and then I’ll come back and talk about Catamite. But wait before, just to segue also. From Joe thinking about Paddy, you know it's about how do we transmute a private memory into a very public kind of performance of history, in a way. And specifically to With/Out and also thinking of Jo, how do we shed new light on histories that are already written or pre-written even before we stepped into this world? How do we allow and we permit this knowledge to continue to flow from generation to generation? So we as the conduit or the carriers are the custodians of this information. And what can a memorial gesture or gesture of memoralizing or commemoration look like? How can it be alternative to these state monuments and these gestures that are over-the-top and grand? How can it be a quiet way and a quiet strategy of memorializing and remembering? And most importantly, how do we challenge the convention in liveness of theater and how do we conjure up the haunting of another being or haunting or the scepter of another production? Okay, with that I will pass to Jean. 

CT: Thank you very much Zihan, for that presentation. I've been thinking a lot about how it is that we encounter work over a long temporal period of time and how long a performance actually exists for? Is it just the event or the performance or are we still in performance for as long, prior to the work that Sarah Bay-Cheng talks about performance as a mode rather than a singular event, such that your point of entry could be any time you begin looking for tickets, to every conversation you have subsequently or the kind of revisitation that you have with the work after. And I think, yeah it was really nice segue, like we now will look at also Jean’s body of work that sometimes deals quite explicitly with these narratives of the state and these memoralization and monuments that the state has and how she moves around them. So, Jean? 

JT: Thanks so much, and thanks so much Joe and Zihan for sharing. I thought it's just really lovely to hear what you shared and just to find so many resonances, I think it echoes, of I think what we're all trying to do in different ways. Yeah so first, an apology, I don't have any slides. I'm just gonna talk and you have to use your imagination. I have an excuse for that. As I was thinking about it then I realized that actually the reason why I don't have slides is because I guess as a writer, as playwright, my work is my text. So when it gets to the production stage and those beautiful production stills and shots that you get actually I never quite feel that that's my own. I mean is you look like my memories, you know that kind of thing but it's never quite my material to present and it's not very exciting to present to you a bunch of text anyway. And so, I will just share. I think some of my experiences I guess as a writer and I guess my journey as a writer and exploring stories and yeah from I guess over a rather long period of time. And just I thought it was really lovely of how Joe is sharing that for you your journey was from public political to personal and mine has been actually quite the opposite and I always, I still do, I resist, I say I'm not a political writer although some people disagree with me but I always think of myself as a personal, I come from a personal point of view and that's how I started telling stories. So you know as a schoolgirl in secondary school when I tell stories, they are always about young Chinese women, you know, with my kind of background. And I think when I first started writing plays I wrote about my own experiences because that was what I knew. I wrote about my grandmother extensively. I wrote like two or three plays about her to get her on my system. I'm often asked where do I find inspiration and I think I find inspiration from stories. I can't tell you it's a very gut feel kind of thing but there's certain stories that get under my skin. I can't quite forget them. You know there's something powerful about stories right that there's something real or creepy or scary or whatever that or disturbing or beautiful that affects me and I get that story under my skin and sometimes I have a chance to tell it immediately and I can. So sometimes it’s from a discomfort for example of my grandmother. It's not being able to communicate with her and yet being her own flesh and blood and yet having that disconnect with her and I think writing was a way of expressing that. But I think at the same time it's also yeah so sometimes it's a different process and sometimes those stories are not my own, but they affect me in a certain way. And so when I write it is a way of processing those emotions that stirs in me. So I guess I will talk about my own journey as a writer in about three or actually four stages. 

So the first stage was when I was a bit younger and I think a lot of my stories and plays were inspired by personal experiences, young women you know dealing with their grandmothers and issues like that and then after that you know and so a play like Everything but the Brain which I wrote about a daughter taking care of her ailing father who had suffered from a stroke and it was about the theory of relativity. And it was very much about my own fears of you know what would happen if I would have to become the caregiver for my father and what would happen if you know I would have to deal with a loved one you know suffering from this kind of situation and you don't want it to turn back time. So it's very personal approach which I kind of melded it with you know relativity and fairytales because I like fairy tales and this. 

And then later on as I continued to explore different stories, I realized that I became quite interested in stories that were a bit further back in time, some undiscovered stories. So you'd explore all the obvious ones, the ones that are close to the surface first but then after that it was like okay what are these stories I haven't heard yet right. So one of these first pieces was actually a play called Sisterts. I was approached by a director Jeffrey T an and it was actually produced here in The Arts House and it was about the Sisters Islands which are offshore islands in south of Singapore and they're pair of small islands. There is a myth about their founding, about a pair of sisters who drowned and were turned into islands when they were being pursued by a pirate and but there is also a history of a crime that was committed there in 1963 when this man Sonny Ang was accused of drowning his girlfriend there and it was on a diving trip because the currents there are very treacherous and she was the first time swimmer and diver. So but all the evidence was circumstantial and yeah and so it was that story that was set in 1963, an actual historical event that was covered at length by the press in the 60s. But by the time we start to explore it, in you know, in early 2000 it was about 50 years later and this story had pretty much all but been erased from I guess from national consciousness you know. But if you ask my parents’ generation, you ask them who Sonny Ang they all know the guy but not my current generation. I thought okay that's interesting that this history or this story that we once, you know that we once shared is no longer being explored or discussed and so what happens when you bring it to stage and you share if an audience that is both young and old. And it was very interesting because we had, I had you know a more mature audiences telling -  me oh I remember this story but we also had young girls who could identify with the story of you know young sisters and they felt for it emotionally. So that play Sisters brought me to another play called Senang which was about the prison riots on Pulau Senang, which was an offshore penal colony in Singapore in the 1960s also and coincidentally in 1963, a mutiny took place there and where the detainees on this island actually rebelled against the Irishman who was -  it was colonial, it was a colonial government at a time, so the Irishman was running the place and they rebelled. They burnt down everything they built you know yeah, in a few hours, they built up over three years. They built reservoirs, they built dormitories, everything, generators and all that and everything was burnt down. They killed for prison wardens including this Irishman Daniel Dutton and reportedly they gouged out his eyes and set him on fire and only his boots were left. So it was very dramatic piece of history that nobody seems to know about either and I certainly never knew about until I started doing research on SIsters and again I thought why is this you know why is this history no longer being spoken about, why is it you know it's completely buried and perhaps part of it is because really everything is so marginalized that it's really taken place offshore. It's all pushed all these stories are pushed off the island literally and they've been buried so they are really buried histories. And I thought you know but why would they do something like that you know what would have cost men to turn on each other to turn on this guy and you know do something like that. So that was my exploration into Senang and I guess later on, if there's time I will talk about my challenges in writing this play because I did not want to write this play, I didn't think I was capable of writing this play set in the 60s about a bunch of gangsters because I'm neither man nor have been in prison in the 60s. So you know I can't come at it from a personal point of view which is usually how I write. So how do I then until these characters lives how do I create vivid characters or even you know semi authentic characters and you know everyone from that period pretty much had passed on or you know was hanged as a result of you know that episode. So I can share a bit more about my experiences or challenges in putting up that play later. So those were two of my island plays and I thought oh great I loved the islands and I would explore one more and I there's an island that I was also is actually very fascinated with - St. John's Island, which used to be I guess, a quarantine site for lepers and I think for TB also if I'm not wrong. So I was fascinated by that history but also in 1963 so everything exciting took place in 1963 offshore of Singapore. Also in 1963, there were political detainees who were brought to this island and I just thought this idea of quarantine the people that were believed to be a danger or contagious in some way whether you know, it was another hundred years back and containing the lepers or containing these people with dangerous Ideas offshore, could somehow protect you know everyone else and I thought that was a great idea I would love to write that play too and then it would be a beautiful trilogy you know of island plays. And I struggled a lot with that play. I mentioned that play but I've never actually completed that play. So this is actually a failed play of mine and I can also talk about that later because I think the failures are sometimes interesting right. Why couldn't I write this play and parts of that play actually eventually ended up in a different play of mine. So nothing's really wasted but I think there was a reason why I struggled so much with it. So that was kind of stage 2 where I started to explore the histories of individuals who were different from me and I think but trying to still access it from a personal point of view albeit one that was very different from my own.

And then later, as I continued to work with different theatre companies and in particular I started working more with a theatre company called Drama Box. So they do a lot of community theater and site-specific work and they work a lot with communities and through them I started working with communities as well.   I started becoming interested in the history of communities and one of the first pieces I did with them was a piece called Ignorland of Its Time, about Bukit Ho Swee and again, Bukit Ho Swee is an old housing estate in Singapore that is most famous for having you know it was it used to be a kind of a slum the area that suffered the worst fire ever in Singapore in 1961. Yeah, sorry my history is like too many numbers. So yeah. So I was fascinated by that event in history but at the same time, I think we were also very interested to explore what were the memories of the current residents or past and present residents of that place. And so what we did was we conducted many interviews with different residents who were both living there, but also who had already left and I think was very interesting was that we figured there was you know what happened during the fire you know? Do you know what happened or know what was there? Some people say, oh it was the Baker's house and t the oven caught fire or something but there were other conspiracy theories or not so and to some of them they were not conspiracy theories. They were like a man came into the village and he the you know a few men came in and they threw you know lighted pieces of you know material you know and easily set the place on fire. And then there were other versions that were these but not just any man these were government men and this was the best way for the government to actually clear the slum and to you know start then on a this to rebuild from scratch because it was, I mean to some people it was home but to others it was kind of a cesspool of you know crime and the slum and it was not a very desirable place. So it was interesting to piece to figure out to piece all these stories together and eventually what we created was a promenade theatre piece that took the audience through different areas of a Bukit Ho Swen and with actors. One actor was the tour guide so to speak and there was another actor who was clearly acting a role. So she was acting as a ghost. But we also had other participants who were the actual members of the community take part at various points and they actually shared their own recollections of the space, of their communities or what it was like to live there and to be relocated you know and the sense of dislocation. So that was Bukit Ho Swee. 

Another similar piece that I did last year also with Drama Box and in a different community was Chinatown Crossings and we are restaging that this year. And it was again similar and actually this was come this was this piece was commissioned or seeded by the STB which is the Singapore Tourism Board. So the sense was that okay, we have to be very proper about this right and you know nothing too subversive or whatever. But you know where artists okay we have to do a piece that you really care about I think and in the first place you know to do a piece in Chinatown or as it was originally called Kreta Ayer or Ngo Chia Suay but in English because it was targeted at tourists, was a challenge because we were like okay how can we authentically find a narrator who would speak English in this place right and I you know you don't have a sam tsui woman to say -  hey hi everybody my name is whatever and come and follow me yeah so no lah. So in thinking about the area and exploring the area more deeply, we realized that there was this real diversity of cultures in Chinatown and there's a beautiful it’s Singapore's oldest Indian temple Sri Mariamman Temple is there and it's right next to a mosque which was also built by Indian Muslims and also very historical sites and then we realized actually there were there were other inhabitants in Chinatown that were not Chinese and whose voices have not necessarily been heard very often and we thought and so we decided okay we will we would take on the voice of and an Indian man who grew up in Chinatown and yes there are you know this person does exist and so there were a few not many but there were a few who did actually spend their childhood in Chinatown and I found this particular archival recording. This transcript of this man who grew up in Chinatown and the passion with which he spoke about this place was extremely inspiring and but what I remember and he refused to move out you know even after he grew up and had his own kids. He only literally moved up when the roof fell in on him and then he was okay I think it's time to go and yeah. So I think capturing his his trying to capture his voice and his experiences was a challenge but yeah okay. 

Oh okay the thing I remember that he kept saying was I wish I could bring them back you know these old residents of Chinatown, yet there was such a sense of belonging and loss about this place that is now completely transformed from the Chinatown of the 60s and 70s that he felt so passionately about. So I wrote a piece that you know covered three different periods in history from this from the 60s, 70s to I think the mid-80s was which was when the area was officially renamed Chinatown by you know the authorities and the present. And yeah, so the subtitle of that piece is actually called Bringing Home the Ghost because I thought that yeah and you know you guys have both mentioned ghosts and hauntings in so many ways and I think a lot of that is about how do you create this? How do you give voice to these ghosts? How do you recreate their presence whether thourgh live performance or through archives or you know in in other forms. 

CT: So I think we would pause here for a little moment so we can maybe address a deeper question to each of the panelists and they can go a little bit further from what they've already shared kind of an introduction to their bodies of work. And I think I'm really interested so far in in I think I see a lot resonance in the way Jean and Zihan look at this enormous archival historical corpus of work, you're entering into this kind of research where you have to do large interpretive functions and looking at an archive or a period of documented history in whatever form whether it's oral or on paper and having to piece together and have a very interpretive function as an artist, gathering materials and often when you see evidence I mean the story could be could be put together in an infinite number of permutations you know how do you look at this mass of information that's provided to you in the archive and then look at the materiality of the things that are presented to you whether they're objects or documents and how does this come to then inform your work? How do you I suppose a dramaturg all these pieces that are provided to you. And I thought maybe Zihan that we could start with you. You could talk a bit about perhaps Catamite yeah.

LZ: So basically Catamite is my most recent production and the reason why I wanted to bring it into this conversation is because we've been talking about excavating histories and speaking on behalf of the dead but I'm also while working through archives, constantly struggling with the ethical repercussions and implications of speaking for and on behalf of especially for people who cannot speak back, people who cannot tell you that they do not want their stories represented. In particular to my own personal practice as excavating queer narratives and queer memory, this real struggle. You know, when is it an invasion of privacy you know? When is it that private lives are forcibly made public against one's will? And how do we negotiate with what drives in being invisible and what insists on refusing representation? Especially because of the social stigma that pervades the disclosure of one sexuality in Singapore due to very real legal laws, you know, 377A in place and it's still in place that criminalizes homosexual sex with, consensual homosexual sex between two adult men. So and what does it mean when we come to wrestle with objects in the archive? Because everything in the archive has been permitted to survive and if we only allow ourselves to excavate the memories that survived, are we doing an injustice to those that cannot be permitted to survive or actively suppress that are not within the National Archive? How do we represent and address these narratives? 

Yeah so operating within this liminal and paying attention to this liminal. So Catamite is basically lecture performance for 20 audience members and it takes on a pedagogical classroom format, is presented earlier this year commissioned by the Singapore Fringe Festival. The critical spine that I'm basing my research on was phenomenology specifically queer phenomenology and in other words object-oriented ontology. How do we pay attention to objects they are ever-present and surround our everyday presence in a way? How do we how do we address what these objects are doing to our corporeal being? And, how we justify our own existence? 

So it takes that as the launching pad specifically because I was inspired. So I invite the 20 audience members in and I get them you can do this as a mental exercise you lay out everything that you have with you today on the floor and then you select an object that would be an evidence for an existence. It can be your existence, it can be a nonhuman existence, as long as it's representative of an existence and collectively the twenty audience members will come together and we will assemble a temporary archive that would represent us as a collective for that day. Yeah and what inspired that particular gesture is the research I did when I visited Australia on a artists residency in 2015 and I visited Australian Lesbian and Gay archive which is a community archive and there they collected objects from the queer community that were donated and I was wondering and this is hypothetically going on to the human futures and human histories, hypothetically, what a queer archive if it was permitted to survive and thrive in Singapore, what would it look like? What sort of objects will it collect? What belongs in a queer archive, queer Singaporean archive? And this was the installation I did in 2015, in response to that hypothetical reimagining. So I sent an open call to the queer community to send in their objects and I collected them and I displayed them, and in an installation. So I had 81 objects from various people within the queer community. But it's exactly this gesture that reminded me that in this gesture of collecting an archive, I'm only representing what people are allowing to be visible. There are still a lot of people who are not capturing this archive because they either are in fear or are uncomfortable with their presence being declared in such a very public way. So it's still a very skewed representation of the queer community in Singapore. And with Catamite I was specifically honing in and zeroing in on one particular object as a way of thinking about what other potential narratives like in all the other 80 objects. So through zoning and zoning in on one object and telling the multiple narratives that it potentially contains, how do we imagine the potential of all the other objects within this archive? 

So there's a there's the critical frame that accompanies this exhibition and I'm gonna read it for you now and this is the room description, that accompanies this installation called Queer Objects And Archive For The Future and the description goes. 

The year is 2065. The nation is celebrating SG100. Section 377A of the Penal Code has been repealed. The first transgender member of parliament was elected to represent the Aljunied constituency at the last General Elections. The Ministry of Human Rights and the community archive are organizing an exhibition of objects from a time capsule buried 25 years ago and this is a selection of 81 objects from that time capsule. So we are moving into the future part, the imagined futures and specifically the object that I was looking at is this object. 

Pass it around. Please be very careful, so you can look at it. 

So it's a watch that is one of these 81 objects and it's this particular watch, I'm gonna read a passage from Catamite, the script that I performed. 

Here is where we arrive at a temporal centerpiece. This Casio watch with a black strap was one of the objects contributed by Casey to Queer Objects And Archive For The Future. Time is arrested at 5 minutes and 21 seconds past 6 o'clock. This is Casey's account of the narrative of the object from our email correspondence.  

“This was the first gift I received from my father when I entered Raffles Institution in 1974. So this watch were happy with me for around 45 years. This present from my father was rather precious to me. I wore it  every day until the strap broke and this was also around the time when my father passed away. I left a watch without a strap in my cabinet four years. After I met Chien Seen in 1994, we both decided to live together. He will occasionally clean up my barang-barang. He saw this watch and went to search for a new strap, fixed it and replaced the battery and the watch had a new life and I gifted this watch to Chien Seen.”

So Casey prefaced our exchange by stating that his, “memory capacitors are so limited these days that not only do I notice that the capacity is reduced, I think my memory becomes more and more unreliable, like a creature that loves to run on its own creative spin”. So beyond the fictional premise of a queer time capsule for the future, I begin to think about the potential of imagining multiple narratives for these objects, held within a temporary archive and will this strategy allow us to gravitate towards things there are often placed out of reach of queer bodies and across different temporalities? How do we speculate and preserve things they are conditionally not permitted to survive through an act of constantly turning things over time? 

So let us begin again, to remember to forget, to turn time and reset our engagement with these objects of study. And here is where the production goes you know like bisected mode. So it’s bisected and the second half of this production, we actually examine a trial from 1942 which is one of the first high-profile trials in British colonial court where 377A was introduced and enforced, and staff officer ,a British staff officer was caught having a relationship with a young male prostitute and the male prostitute stole the watch because you know his expectations of remuneration was not met and this watch became evidence in a trial between this colonial officer and the young boy. And so it's reimagining a different narrative, potential narrative for this watch and a duplicitous narrative of sorts that’s intended to be  fictional. But then at the end of the production we turn and we examine the objects that we have assembled and we reimagine different narratives for these objects. So that's tangibly how I'm trying to work through this. 

CT: And I think what was interesting about the piece is because we also had brought our own objects into the space. They become part of this strange present, past, future historical collection that we kind of assemble in front of us and it gets us to interrogate how we gotten here, you know how have our personal history intersected with the kind of longer stretch of the past of this country. How have the kind of difficulties of hidden stories come to light and I think it's really interesting to see how this also refracts through, we all became kind of characters in your work. We also played other roles later on, audience members had speaking roles in the trial, for example, and I think I'm also interested in in looking at how Jo's characters have become historical characters almost in Malaysian history, you know. They've popped up very often over the past 30 years, over this very long duration of time and I'm curious as to how you and your characters may be separate or maybe together as the various entities that have also come close to in abrasion with the state. How does satire dropped against them or maybe fallen off them? How the characters that you've brought to life have come in contention with the powers that be, the narratives that be? Have they had an impact or less than you hope they would? What are some of these tensions that you've had?

JK: Well of course there has been tensions with the state over the years, at various points and various performances. There has been you know, we've had to meet with the Home Office and had to have interviews by the police and things like this. But in the early days and it's quite cyclical and it's quite, Malaysia is very different from Singapore. We're quite disorganized which allows subversion to happen I think more easily. I think it's very hard to be subversive here on many levels so you have to be much more subtle. We can be quite obvious, I think, sometimes and because we have a very messy system, I've always felt I think we can attempt to be more utterly open about it and I know that when Instant Cafe first started, we did say very clearly to ourselves, we will just do it until we get stopped. So that's always been our modus operandi. We may be young and foolish but it did help us and it was an interesting relationship with the state because of course when the state was very powerful and felt very much in charge, they found us quite amusing. And I remember  being called into the whole ministry once and they said to us you know you did this show and you said this and you shouldn't have said it but we know of course you're just making jokes but other people might not understand it. So you should be more sensitive and would you mind you know not because of us, other people may think. And so well I see other people of course. So it's a kind of strange dance you do with authority. You meet in a room with them. Iremember there was a no-smoking sign and they said but you can smoke you know, and here's some kueh as well. So they were very polite and of course we knew that we weren't really gonna listen to what they said and we weren't really gonna change what we did but they had done their job. They had ticked us off their list. They've been responsible as government officials and then we felt we had to be responsible as artists and do our work, that we needed to do. 

So those sorts of episodes happened you know not frequently but sometimes. And I remember we started getting invited to perform at government functions in fact. That was very interesting I remember we were invited to perform in Langkawi for what is a very big delegation of finance ministers and trade ministers and Anwar Ibrahim who was at that point the Deputy Prime Minister having a lot of problems at that time, this is a 98, with the prime minister, he was the guest of honor at the front table and we performed what we wanted to perform and we said what we wanted to say and he had his head in his hands most the time but he was very visibly laughing and later the his protocol officers grabbed hold of us and said how dare you, how dare you! Why did you do that, air our dirty laundry in public and as they were berating us the doors open, all the delegates came out and they said to us - wow we didn't know Malaysia had such an open democracy and I said to the protocol officers, you see we are tools of the state we lied for you. And I felt terrible because I felt like maybe sometimes we were being in that way you know used and it was very uncomfortable feeling and I know the last show my character of YB one of the things he said was he made fun of satirist he said yeah those satirist like those instant coffee people he thinks. He said they think that they are making a difference. What a joke. They've made no difference at all. So I think in that way we've often kind of had to reflect on the fact that we say these things but it's I think there's been some impact maybe. I know that somebody has done some research recently on the impact that Instant Café’s had on Malaysian audiences. I know the impact is larger than the people in the room and that's why I'm interested in what the things you were saying about gesture and how gesture reaches. I'm always interested in theater which is not what's happening inside the room of the theater but actually how other people are reading it somewhere else. And I remember going to Penang once many years ago and this because we perform in all kinds of strange spaces and in this ballroom this electrician came up to me and said to me – I love it. I love Instant Café. I love your company. I'm like,  oh pakcik when did you see us? I never seen you but he'd heard of us and he said I just like the fact that you exist. He’d heard what we did and the we made fun of the government and he said that's love it and he had switched his roster that day so he could work in the daytime. So he'd sneak into the ballroom and watched us that evening. So things like that I felt you know, that’s not the kind of impact that goes on beyond what's happening inside the theatre. The theatre is only a small place but what's happening elsewhere is much more interesting and because we used to perform in in kind of like all these strange functions and I was often quite resentful of it because but it was a way to make a living and I was  complaining to a friend of mine once and say oh I've gotta do it shows a thousand people you know half of them don't and he said to me you'd never get our audience coming to the theater. These are people who don't go to the theater. This is everybody from the CEO to the office-boy and they are coming in to watch your show and you're reaching a big audience. And I realized actually then I was very grateful that we had that opportunity to reach out to many more people. I hope that answers your question about characters.

CT: Yeah I know I think it does flesh out also that dance that we currently have to do, you know when are we co-opted when are we not co-opted, when are we subverting, when are we being subverted, when are the tables turned against us and the constant kind of shape-shifting that the practitioners to do over time to align and realign oneself with the dominating structures that be.  

JK: Well I just want to talk about this one incident.  This was in 90, 1999.  When was Anwar arrested? When was he arrested? When was the black eye incident? 98. So Instant Café  had been invited in 1997 then to perform for the APEC conference in KL. So like sure we'll do it and of course then Anwar was arrested, put in jail, given a black eye and we wrote a lot of material about this incident and then of course we realized oh we've got this APEC conference coming up at the end of the year what do we do? Do we do it or we do we not do it? And we thought, we're gonna do it and if they decide to ask us just before the show not to do it, then okay we have no choice but let's do it and see what happens. And so we did it and a lot of references to Reformasi, a lot of references to what had happened, the sodomy accusations etc and after that the government never asked us to perform again, of course. But I think for us it was a kind of culmination of that period for us that we felt we needed to say this and that again that idea that part of the dance is to say okay you asked us to dance, so we'll dance. You asked us not to dance then we'll, we won't dance. 

CT: Thank you so much for sharing that. Finally we turn to Jean. Do we talk about the last stage of your work that you are encountering right now. You've brought us on this trajectory of moving from a very personal writing from a very specific but individual point of view to expanding to Island narratives, community narratives, and how do you make sense of those things and if you could share a bit more about the navigation that you have to do yeah.

JT: So yes I think that has been for me that that shift actually away from personal to a more public more public narratives or other people's narratives actually not necessarily public I think one. One particular piece that I do want to talk about is a piece that we did for SIFA four years ago. I think Corrie mentioned it's called It Won't Be Too Long: The Cemetery (Dusk) right because it was part of a trilogy and but this particular segment was actually a verbatim theater piece. So we had gone around and interviewed about 10 to 12 different individuals who were involved in the planned, the government exhumation of the Bukit Brown Cemetery, in order to build a road through it which has now been completed actually. And so we interviewed different people including the descendants of some of the people who were buried there as well as some of the activists who actually became tomb whisperers and activists who actually became very interested in this issue and very passionate about the Bukit Brown space and wanted to protect it, people from the heritage society, from the nature society and yeah as well as individuals. And we also managed to get government representation. So we were very fortunate to have the minister actually agreed to speak to us about, well I won’t say controversy but some of the discussions that they had over that period in discussing how to deal with this exhumation and I think kind of the kind of the rise of these almost a natural kind of sprouting of these little civil activist groups that just came out of nowhere just because they were like -  oh this is this is an important piece of land and this is important for our heritage or nature and we need to fight for it. And the reason why I keep looking towards yes because Charlene was our dramaturg during that period and thank God for her. Y es and so I think what was very interesting was this is because this was verbatim theater so literally I cannot add anything and whatever they say and whatever we want to put into the play we will actually go back to them and to say this is what we want to put in are you okay with this and some were okay and some were not and some would come back and like cross out sentences or they were correct that when Grandma and we're like it's not about that you know you don't have to speak in perfect sentences you know it's really about capturing the feel. And some would also cross up the the bits that they felt were more sensitive. Which was unfortunate but I think we had to respect that and then but how do you put together how do you extract from 300 pages of transcripts? how do you extract a storyline? And how do you curate an arc for this experience that these individuals had been through. So I think that was really the great challenge and I said I worked very closely with Heng Leun and with Charlene in trying to find a shape for the story and of course we had our own point of view. So but then you're also then representing individuals voices, the verbatim, you know their actual words, you know sometimes with the actual pauses and the uhmm and the aaahss and I think most of the participants, most of the interviewees were quite happy with how they were represented. A couple were not as comfortable with how they came across even though it was their own words. So that was rather interesting but was not surprising but yeah so the challenge was then how do you create a story and I think one of the challenge has always been for me  - so if I'm telling someone else's stories or if I'm taking history, how do I then create a story from this? Like I mentioned from when I was doing Senang and all the research for that, I remember there was a point of time when I was very pleased at hi please I found all the research and pieced together this riot and I presented a draft of that and then my mentor said to me, yes, go back and look at it and now throw away all the history, forget about the history, write the story. So I think as a playwright for myself, my responsibility is to the story so I always say inspired by and not necessarily you know. This is not, I'm not a historian and I do not pretend to be one. So what I do is I try to craft a narrative based on whatever skills I have and whatever material I have and you may or may not the audience may or may not agree with me but this is my raw material and I think and yeah I said with Bukit Brown, we did go back to each of the interviewees to make sure that yes, are you comfortable with this? Is this is what you will be, you know these are your words that will be put on the stage? And I feel that was very important. 

And then the last stage or the most recent stage, you know not the last stage of my career… as I continue to explore, is actually, I think inviting people in and I think that comes back to I think what you're doing with Catamite and some of these other you know explorations and inviting the audience to bring their own histories and their own narratives into a space. 

So last year with again with Drama Box, the director Xuemei, we created a piece called Missing and in this piece, audiences were asked to bring an object that represented a relationship that you had lost or had gone missing, a connection that you had lost and you would come to Drama Box, you would place it and it would be part of an installation and then you were given a kit and you would go out to a place where, that meant something to you and there were certain activities which you could do or you might did not have to do, when you went out on your own expedition, you could go as far as you want or you can just go downstairs but I think it was really whatever you wanted to put into it, you know, you would get out of it right and however deeply you want to explore this lost relationship you could so. We had zero and I mean there was an audio narrative that accompanied this but we really had zero control as to what the audience would do, whether they would just go to McDonald's and have a drink, which I understand some of them did, you know or they would go to Pulau Ubin you know or to the ends of Singapore. But I think and when they came back, we allowed them to share you know their experiences and yeah and I think that was about really letting the audience engage and to bring their own stories into it. So it's been an interesting journey for me like for me I feel it's still about stories but it's also about whose stories am I telling now. So it's gone from kind of my own stories to more you know different people's stories to I think allowing the audience the space to experience all - to reflect on their own experiences. 

LZ: Just two things that I'm also working through as we go on this, apparently this trajectory of introspective participatory theatre that Singapore is currently obsessed with at least for the past six months, and really it came up in the morning as part of some conversation too - you know what are the ethical implications of dramaturging and audience and this is probably segue to next year's edition of dramaturgy of participation panel but how do we grapple with manipulating an audience? Let's just say that, you know. Let’s call a spade a space. We are basically shaping an audience experience and asking them to go onto a very introspective personal reflexive safe journey, and do we have the skills and the ability to guide them through it and out of it, in a sensitive and attentive manner. And number two, again something I'm grappling with that Jean reminded me of, when are we sacrificing the nuances or the details in telling our story for the sake of conveying a good narrative for, the sake of telling a good story and being trapped within the aesthetics of theater. And when are we able to say I'm not gonna stage a good show because this story requires me for me for me to say all these things and it cannot be a good theater piece? are we allowed to do that? And will the work circulate? 

JK: Can I respond to that? I was just thinking I mean Janet brought this up yesterday as well we talked about the dramaturgy of the state right, and that the politicians are very good dramaturgs and they have created this dramaturgy of the state that we are all have been manipulated into believing as well. And they have no such compunction as you to think do they have a right? Do they have an ethic and ethical responsibility in doing it? They just are doing it. So I think as artists I think we also should feel we have a right but we are more ethical perhaps or we should be more ethical, which is trying to find a balance. But sometimes I feel when the state is so unethical and I think that's when we have to be a bit more blunt. I mean I feel as a Malaysian I've had to be more blunt in the past because I feel that your power is so huge that if I don't come back at you very strongly I will get swallowed up by your narrative. And that's why I think when I felt that I didn't have a history that then I have to create histories and we have to give other people voices for their histories and maybe sometimes we make a lot of mistakes but I think what is the alternative? It is to hear nothing back and I think that's for me even worse because then the state narrative gets larger and larger and overwhelms us, you know until you actually believe that it's a 200th anniversary of something. I mean it isn't, quite frankly, it isn't. 

LZ: So basically a few years ago as part of SIFA I did this production called I am LGB which is this indoctrination exercise that is commenting on the education system where I put a hundred participants in lab coats and subject them to what I consider now quite violent gestures. 

CT: For someone who was there, I do agree. 

LZ: I think all of that violence, some productive conversation happened but that is exactly like what Jo was talking about you know. Since then I've been thinking how do we avoid replicating these didactic and draconian gestures, performed by the state on our bodies. How do we avoid replicating that violence as theatre-makers and how do we avoid replicating their violence when we choose to represent others and represent ourselves. And I think the answer is in encouraging a kind of duplicity or as Lai Teck or Tzu Nyen would say like a double agent of sort like this tactical fluidity that constantly flips the table and constantly allows for this duplicity of truths, differing accounts of memories and versioning of histories. This flipping of the table. 

JK: I was gonna say that I had the same issue right and so I think that's why my work moved from the public to the personal. And in fact when last year I say we won the elections part of me was like, oh dear, now I've got to go and do more political satire because I must make sure that I have a counter narrative to the new government right. But actually I've been going into much more personal narratives because I began to feel I didn't want to give YB for example any more airtime. I thought I'm tired of hearing those voices of those in power and by me performing him, I was giving him more voice and I thought that was wrong of me and I should stop so I hung up the songkok actually for some years. But last year after the elections people kept saying to me, we want to hear from him and I had such an issue this year trying to write him because I was feeling him coming through my body and my ears. He's so irritating and I was trying to think, no, you lost you lost the elections and he said very smugly, no, I won. I won my seat and I had to admit that this had happened that the power structure is still there right. But part of me wants to leave that behind and go into the more personal narratives and in one of the plays that I did, a friend of mine who came to watch it and this very personal narrative that I wrote nothing to do with the state at all and she said to me -  Oh in some ways I think this work is more subversive because when you watch this play, she said, no one can deny that you are part of this soil, you are also bumiputra. You are also a person of this soil, you belong. And I thought that was very interesting that these personal narratives are also subversive in their own way, maybe more deeply because they are not propaganda, they're not oppositional, they're not reactive, they are merely story not merely, they are story and therefore, fundamental. 

CT: Thank you so much. I think at this point you know we've ended quite a robust discussion of these various points. I'd like to open up to the floor for any questions. Yes, Robin. 

R: First of all thank you very much all three of you. It was very enlightening to hear. I've got a question for each and every one of you. I'm gonna start with Jo. 

In 2011, I watched you perform in a play called Balek Kampung where you played somebody who was imprisoned as a journalist. And of course today that I realized that your father's a journalism dad. I just want to find you since we're talking about public and private you playing that role, how was it tapping into that and playing that role. You were very good in it and there was something very palpable in their performance and you playing opposite Sukania in that the two of you it was there was something quite palpable in there and then I wonder how much of your personal history was brought into that in terms of the theatre. So that's for you. 

And for Zihan, I think the struggle that Zihan  talks about is if indeed history, as Jo has put up, is fiction, right, so that you putting something up, you're contesting authenticity. They're contesting versions of authenticity right. So how would you be able to authenticate what you do, apart in fact that you're doing it and how is your revision of the past not also perpetuating whatever, like you said, apparatus of oppression that came before, you know? Is that that again, how do you safeguard yourself? How do you get that reflexivity right?

And then for gene again the whole idea of the self-appointed custodian of other people's voices. What is the responsibility and how do you deal with that? How do you come clean? Do you declare that? Do you make a pact with the audience? Do you deliver that in your writing, that you constantly have reminders that this is somebody's voice or how do you do that in order to, if you are indeed a custodian to protect those voices, or to hold the integrity of those voices of which you have borrowed? you have leased. Yeah so that's my three questions.

JK: Well luckily my father was never put in prison, that was good. But I've had many friends over the years who have ended up in in either in lockup or in prison long term and of course I've heard their stories. I remember one of my friends who went for a conference which I was supposed to be at and didn't make it to because I had a show to do in another state and he was in lockup and he had to stay longer than people expected him to stay because his name is Kam Rasla but he looks very mat salleh because he’s mixed heritage. So people mistook him for another activist called Colin Nicholas who is an orang asli activist. So he ended up staying in prison longer because they look at him I thought -  well you are the white guy. So you stay in longer because you must be that person working with the indigenous people and the guy who was actually Colin Nicholas was let out early and he was very flabbergasted, as to why this was. So you know this is a kind of very arbitarian and messy nature of our political system. But for the inspiration of Balek Kampung, actually I know your system here's far more inflexible and terrifying in a different way and I read to Teo Soh Lung’s Beyond The Blue Gate for inspiration for that. Even when I think about that book still I shake slightly because I think it's a very moving very powerful account of her incarceration. So that was actually my more direct research and embodying, I think for me.

LZ: Tough, tough question. Basically the constant challenge - how do i authenticate to avoid… how do i authenticate my own gestures in my practice to avoid replicating the apparatuses of oppression by the state. I think there are two prongs. The first one is due diligence. Due diligence in the form of the labor of care and the labor of maintenance and I performed this labor of care in the objects that I choose to archive and I engage with, as thorough as I can be, with the resources I have, within the limited reach that I can perform. So in concrete example. So when I was researching for Catamite and I was digging historical documents for the case, you know, I exhaust or I attempted to exhaust all the possibilities of where I could glean this information from, to ensure that the version that I'm reproducing is not just constructed from one citation or one account but multiple accounts. And the other way I resolved it and I'm able to go to sleep at night because it's difficult, it's knowing that I'm in at the end of the day you know you're a caretaker for information, you’re a custodian for information. So it's important that you recognize that you're passing this information on but not just passing it on, passing it on without closing it in the act of passing in on. So a lot of audience or several audience members came up to me after Catamite and said you know but you didn't draw that link. You didn't draw that link on how our colonial history is linked to our objects of oppression and everyday and how it's still persisting. But I didn't do the explicit link because I didn't want to close that knowledge on behalf of you or for you in a way that I think you should and in a way seeing yourself as the conduit for information, to allow power or to allow knowledge pass through you to another generation, to another being. I think it's a way of ethically grappling with that, I think. And it's supposedly Foucauldian in a way you know, this care and this labor, it is caring for and of self-verification process that you subject yourself to in the care for the self, you know. Because that's the only way we can continue to make work and to move on without being stuck.

JT: Yeah, tough questions. So my responsibility as the custodian of other people's voices. So I guess most directly for say, a verbatim theatre piece, I think I mentioned before for the Bukit Brown piece then it was engaging them in discussion about what text exactly was being represented on stage and making sure that they were comfortable with that and respecting their decisions, whether they chose to you know take lines out or not. So but that's one form of it. So I have written other pieces where there's been it's a bit more blurry right. So in Bukit Ho Swee there is a mix of a fictional character that's inspired by someone but there are also other characters whose, I say characters, but other individuals who speak for themselves. And I think for me it was quite clear in that case that the invented character was fiction. So this was a fictional character, the fictional tourguide who had lost a sister in the fire in 1960s and this was a purely fictional character but some of the memories I would say were borrowed from other people's memories. So but it was quite clear that this is not based on you know except someone. In a case like Chinatown Crossings, I think it was very yes so this was an interesting case because you know we had decided that it was important to represent a minority voice, the diverse voices in this piece. So we had a Cantonese Ma Jie, we had a young girl but we also, a young Chinese girl, who was her ward but we also had the friend, the good friend and actually the main protagonist, Kunalan, who was the Indian boy who grew up under the care of this Ma Jie. And yes when I wrote the first draft of the script, I was very concerned about how I was representing this voice and I think in discussion with Huiling, my director, who is also Chinese, we decided that we really needed to find an Indian dramaturg to come on board the project. And so we worked with Nanda or Hemang Nandav and it was extremely, it changed the piece, right. So to have him on board and to have his voice and say okay, this feels like a Chinese person speaking that kind of thing, is like, no, the temple is actually not about this. It is about this and oh okay and yes, thank goodness. And I think that was very… but there was something that I felt from the start that if I was to write the story I would need to have his input. So I started a first draft without him but after that having him come aboard, it was more than invaluable, it was integral to the process and I think together with we shaped the piece or rather we reshaped it and reshaped that perspective. But there are other cases. I mentioned my failed play Saint which I only wrote one act of and then kind of tried to forget about it. So Saint was I think Jo mentioned you know speaking to or reading to Soh Lung’s book which I also did and I've met her and she's very inspiring a person to meet and to speak to and I did want to write something of her experience as well, drawing from her experiences and I could not find a shape in a realistic play in a that was set in a you know in that realistic world. I could not find the right shape or an authentic form for it. So eventually I took the fragments of this play and I brought it into a very surreal world, a surreal play called The Shape of a Bird, which was all about imagination. And so I created those scenes that I imagined with a female detainee but it was in this kind of surreal world where she was using her imagination to recreate stories and she was a storyteller. So I suppose that was one of my ways of dealing with it, yeah. 

CT: Thank you. Do you have any more questions? We have time for a couple more questions, if anyone has them. Or any thoughts or responses to the works that's been shared so far? I think we've had a, emphasis has been very Malayan or Singapore-Malaysia in terms of scope and I was also curious of maybe other international participants how your work also encounters other kinds of histories. We have a certain kind of fixation with identity in Singapore and history in Singapore with a kind of storytelling but I'm also you know, possibly interested to hear from other delegates or participants if you have any comments about that.  

V: Hi, I'm Valerie Kaneko Lucas from Regents University London. And I guess my question was one that was raised earlier, which is how does Singapore negotiate a colonial history that was not of its own making. Yeah I mean I was quite surprised not in a good way that Sir Stamford Raffles whose wife wrote his autobiography and embroidered it quite a bit that it was this this kind of the colonial masters were being sort of highlighted or is this just part of a touristic agenda that artists are constantly having to battle against. Does that makes sense?

LZ: So, recently there have been like a spell of several plays, within this year that, because of the bicentennial celebrations, so there's also been an active resistance or countering in response. So TNS’ Civilised, Miss British by the Esplanade, which I did a multimedia for, Ayer Hitam by Sharon, so there are several projects and I believe several more projects in the pipeline working within the realm of aesthetics in a way, within the limited reach that we have as theatre makers, to counter sort of a national narrative. But like what Jo said, you know, the state is always so intimidating in their scope and their size and their reach and sometimes it's like David and Goliath, you know terms of scale and impact and change and shifting of mindsets. But like for example within Catamite, it's countering the colonial history. Learning… it's not just countering us in refusing it but tracking the connections of how things originated, where and when. Why is Judge Mental Singh wearing a horsehair wig? And when did judges stop wearing it and why? And tracking the evolution of how our being, our identity came to be and how it defines us. I think that's more productive.

CT: Maybe we can take Janet and then Robin?

J: I’m just curious because the work, the history that you have looked at, whether it's archival or contrasting it with the present, it's got a lot to do with past and present. And even Jo, in your case, other than their work, you have suddenly put both the characters as going to participate in the next election. And so you also mention how you try to bring the two - so I'm curious about, you are taking history you're presenting it now and then you talk about this very big machine and the subtle small work that you're doing, how do you see that affecting the future or do you feel, because now we start you know these kind of titles like human futures and all are starting to get into the theater world and it's not easy in theater to actually talk about the future because of the nature of theater. So I'm just curious, do you, is it necessary or do you expect an impact or are you starting people off to -  why is this word ‘futures’ is being dragged into the theater now? 

LZ: This is why it is absolutely necessary to think about theater beyond the here and the now and the event, and to think about after lives or the future lives of the performative gestures that we capture and we do today. So one concrete example is for With/out, there was this Facebook page to archive all the materials that I worked with in terms of research and using the Facebook Timeline as an example of dating certain milestones in Paddy’s life but also in the production timeline, and also making sure that all the versions of each different night because we live streaming on Facebook each performance by Janice is captured. So there are five different versions floating around on this Facebook page that will continue to survive beyond myself, beyond me, beyond Janice, beyond Paddy. So it's ensuring once again the conduit, like we are the conduit for the information, but also shaping in such a way so we don't close it or we don't foreclose it and we allow for potential future to come out form the next person who have to archive this and don't have to go through all the archival gestures that I have to go through. Yeah so building a future. Sounds like propaganda but maybe it is.

JK: I mean there's two different things. I think that this idea that theater is beyond what happens in the room I think is becoming increasingly important to me, because I perform so often in places which are not theatres. Partly because of funding, because it's lack of money so you perform in other kinds of spaces and sometimes we had to perform in strange spaces because those people were paying us to perform there. So in all these are kind of some practical considerations but I learnt a lot from having to do that and I've learned to appreciate it though at the time I didn't. So I began to think about all those places which are not theater spaces which in a way are extensions of theater spaces. So my YB character for example, for the last four years has not stepped into a theater. He's existed purely on YouTube and this time when I performed, I realized most the people who came to watch YB, didn't know that I was YB, and some of the guests who appeared on stage with me and sat next to me and talked to me, didn't realize it was me because they've been watching viral videos of YB on YouTube and my name is not attached of course because the fiction is he exists on his own. So that for me was very interesting because he then has a life as a real person who is diabolical right and that will remain in perpetuity to remind people, hopefully of the diabolical people that we just got rid of, but that they are still out there. And the other thing is this idea of yes and this is where I have a bit of guilt, you see, about this. Because actually I don’t want YB to run for Prime Minister at all, but I know that he does and so he had, so I had to allow him to say, that he should be the next Prime Minister of Malaysia, I just hope he doesn't live here long enough and I've tried to kill him off quite a few times in the past. He's now 98 years old, I mean he claims to be older than Mahathir and that's why he says he should be the next prime minister, because if you can vote in a 93-year old, surely your next choice is a 98-year old. So I kind of think he won't survive so it's fine. In GE15 he won’t be around but I kind of have made a promise to people about Curry Spice and she has said the next Prime Minister of Malaysia should be a bisexual, Indian woman from Sentul. And I have put it out there because I feel I want people to imagine why not? Why are we going for the same story? Why even after a big general election where we said we changed everything, we changed little imaginatively? And now I think do I actually have to follow through with this and because so many people come up to me and said I'll be on your campaign. I'll be your general manager. People started coming up with slogans for me. A very good friend of mine Ivy Josiah who is an activist, a woman's rights activist said to me, we will put out your womanifesto and I'll help manage your campaign. So she was very serious and here I am thinking this will be my last grand gesture in the political sphere of political work and I want to kind of now start going down the more private route of personal stories and I've suddenly have given myself this big responsibility. How much am I responsible now that I have put it out there? How ethical am I going to be by then saying I'm not going run in any way? But I felt it was important to put it out into the future because other people can then imagine, why not? If there's somebody like Curry Spice out there saying why not have a bisexual, Indian woman to be Prime Minister of Malaysia, maybe that imagination being out there is important, well it was important to me anyway and important to a few people, few. 

CT: We have time for one very last question. Cui?

C: My question is about post-show digestion for the audiences and to what extent you actually create spaces or how your strategies for creating that space for post-show, you know so after the trauma of I am LGB or any other type of thing or maybe when you're dealing for example with Jean in Flowers where you do with potentially very triggering or traumatic histories about sexual assault and things like that, and violence and patriarchy, what are the type of strategies for maybe dramaturging conversations amongst audiences and with artists and maybe that is also where you bring in nuances that did not fit nicely into a space of theater because why does everything have to be in theater anyway? just doesn't fit then that doesn't fit.  I would be interested to hear more from how you have used the post-show space or even pre-show space to scaffold your work for audiences.

CT: Maybe we can start with Jean. 

JT: Yeah, sure. So this piece that Cui mentioned Flowers is actually a site-specific work in a home where we have recreated a home where a family used to stay, a brother and sister grew up but it's also a piece about the impact I guess of patriarchal oppression and kind of the residual damage, you know, the damages that it creates. So I think it was always, I think for Xuemei you know as the director and in creating the space it was always very vital to her to have this decompression space, especially we have a topic as sensitive as that for audience members who are uncomfortable to be able to step out. And so, we and we had a lot of discussion on where that decompression space could be, you know, back, ya know, front porch, you know that kind of thing. And in certain spaces we'll just rule out because you know you get stuck there. So in the end we left the space in the front porch and for me I felt that piece especially really needed a post-show engagement. I felt that it would really benefit from this you know a kind of decompression or you know an area to digest or just to discuss or just to open up conversations. And I think that Drama Box has tried to make that space as welcoming as possible and of course I was all for like yeah let's force them all to sit down there and like talk to each other after that and Xuemei was like no, no, no, cannot. So, I mean it was it was very open and it was really up to you but we know there was an invitation to you know after you're done would you like to and there was an exhibition that well you know with some of these timelines of I guess these milestones right in the in Singapore's history that was laid out in that area. So, I think people were naturally drawn to it to a certain extent and there was a very open invitation for whoever wanted to stay and talk and I felt that I think for those who did stay and talk, that really impacted how they would have viewed the experience especially something like that which was so personal and so solitary to have that space to actually open up discussion.

CT: Unfortunately, we're running out of time but thank you so much to everyone who's asked questions.

RL: Just have one last thing to say. Jo just to remind everybody. Recently, in Ukraine somebody calls the Zelensky, who played a politician on TV became the president of Ukraine. So again there is futures in the performativity of something like this. So, Curry Spice yeah that's all.

CT: I think I think this conversation is really focus, you know not just in the ethics of care when it comes to looking at histories and the way we engage with them but also an aesthetics of care in the kind of mechanics we put in surrounding each work - how do we make visible what is invisible? What is it we are duplicating? What is it we replicating? And questioning those narratives. So thank you very much. A round of applause for all the panelists, please.